Technology is only as great as the problems it solves. It is best to connect to businesses by providing highly valuable use cases which require technological solutions provided or enabled by the Google Cloud Platform. For the purposes of the exam it is important to understand which problems can or cannot be solved by cloud computing technologies as well as how to present these problems as verifiable use cases to business stakeholders. Build business use cases to connect the right tool with the right job to solve the right problem. This is necessary for stakeholders to make informed decisions and to recommend your products or services. For example, maybe you've created a highly efficient next generation video streaming application which can process a billion requests per second and stream anywhere around the world in under a second, but what use is that for an e-commerce company specializing in selling car parts? Perhaps they could be a user of your platform, but they would not be interested in acquiring or investing in the product as such.

The overall business strategy is a measurable and verifiable architecture which leads a business to increased profitability, market share, presence, or fulfills some other goal. Whatever problem you solve with your architecture should be in support of this strategy, even a centerpiece of it, but unless you are working in a tech company, it is NOT the strategy in itself. Anything you build should be enabling businesses to develop their overall game plan for success in the market and, if it can't, then the technology will not sell.

Architecture goes beyond engineering to solve some limited feature or problem set and instead determines a technological solution to solving or supporting a business strategy. Modern technological solutions, especially for enterprise customers, require a huge investment of dollars, time, and opportunity cost to develop and also carry significant risk. As a technology developer you carry less risk in that you will be paid for time accrued, but the business carries the risk of technological failure or unforeseen budgetary or human capital issues.

In light of this, be sure to generate specific goals bound by clear quantities of dollars and time. When you present your use case to the business there should be no doubt about how your technology or solution solves a valuable problem for the business and in a way which technology is either the only way or the best way to solve the problem. Demonstrating a competitive mindset and understanding of the broader market will give businesses confidence in your proposal and your ability to deliver. Couple this with a track record of success and you can generate sales quickly.

Example

A mom and pop rare antique resale shop, ReAntiquated, has enjoyed success in their local city, but often gets calls from other customers around the country about wares the shop might have for sale. The company owners are not versed in modern methods of cloud computing or e-commerce activities and they have enlisted you for a proposal to build a website which lists their items for sale and processes transactions. To build the proposal you should demonstrate how GCP's technology can help achieve the businesses strategy of market expansion. They are pursuing market expansion through increased visibility of products and ease of customer transactions. The proposal should consist of a collection of use cases which enable the company's business without overloading the business with useless or overpriced features which are not necessary to achieve the required objectives.

An example would be: "User A lives in a different state. They should be able to access your website, observe the current inventory you have for sale, note the price, shipping, apply discounts, and complete the transaction." To solve this we would use GCP's core technologies for application development including GCP's App Engine, Firestore, Cloud SQL, and BigQuery to create and host the website and provide actionable analytics to your business. As a serverless solution, GCP's App Engine can scale as your business grows and can easily manage any number of users with minimal intervention from you.

Be wary of use cases which do not help the business achieve its strategy. For example, a business this small would not benefit from machine learning so that would be a use case which would not satisfy their requirements or strategy and should therefore be omitted from your proposal. Perhaps if the company achieves a certain level of growth then a recommendation system could benefit the business, but that would require a much more mature business strategy and MlOps pipeline to enable the technology.